>And there is little 'new ruler' can do to establish himself if people don't need a ruler.
Did you, as an uncoerced free man, ever swear an oath of fealty to the US government? (The pledge of allegiance doesn't count.) Did your parents? Did their parents? Did their parents? Has anyone?
Anybody who may have elected to be governed by the United States is now dead, and the chances are good that you're not even related to them by blood. The vast majority of people who have lived under some form of government in their lives almost certainly did not choose to.
EDIT: Unless they immigrated. Forgot about that option. If you immigrated to the United States, you are exempt from this thought experiment.
But not totally, because you probably weren't stateless when you did.
> Nonsense. The idea that a government can rule over you and and your children for all of time, until it gives you permission to leave, is just ridiculous.
Of course anyone can leave the country and its government, that is basic human right, you just cannot take a part of country with you, because all other citizens have the same rights for that part of country like you.
> As long as a government maintains the consent of the governed, those citizens should adhere to the laws. Otherwise, it’s time for a new government.
Obviously, but the society that decides that is a full body of citizens of the country, not just some subset based on ethnic lines or historical borders of ancient countries of the past. That would be nationalistic thinking of 19. century and we saw in 20. century where ethnic nationalism leads.
> Do you agree that you can choose to not follow the law?
Not only can you do not follow a law, but people in power do it successfully today. Immigration law is the obvious example. Those in power flout the law so blatantly that the law might as well not exist. Deportation virtually doesn't happen anymore. When there are no consequences for disobeying a law, it is the same as if the law didn't exist.
> Would you also agree that if enough people chose to not follow the law, government would cease to exist?
I think it might be better to word this as "enough people choose to rebel against their government." When that happens, there is usually some fighting that goes on and the government either wins or gets replaced. There is never a point with no government, however. The reason for this is because just about every government, no matter how tyrannical, is still preferable to anarchy.
> Natural law doesn't really preclude you from cooperating, unlike reality shows
> Why would they protect these resources rather than take them?
Probably for cooperative reasons! It doesn't matter, though. These are hypothetical situations that I don't think there is much value in considering. I'm totally in the "anarchy is so bad I'd prefer tyranny to it" camp.
> You have no reasonable way of opting out of government rule. Governments control all the habitable land, and most of us don’t have the resources or even the legal permission to move elsewhere.
The quickest way to change the law is to board a plane. Yes it's difficult to create a whole new country, but there are 200 readymade countries to choose from.
(I'm surprised this is so controversial. I'm just saying individuals do have some direct control over the laws that they are subject to).
> The other option I see is to posit that in modern democracies the principle of self-determination is unnecessary.
For geographically dispersed people? Yes, sovereignty is impossible and undesirable as you’d have to take it from the locals wherever you were getting the land from.
For people living under an oppressive regime (or one they view that way), it’s a different story. They are the locals and thus should have a government that fits the local population.
You can’t create sovereignty out of thin air. You have to take it from someone if you’re going to give it to someone else. All the land on this planet has been accounted for for some time now.
> We used to believe that free and open societies would naturally prosper compared to authoritarian/totalitarian societies but what if that was all a lie?
Then give up your freedom and start advocating for monarchy in America.
> Government exists for all animals. It is an immutable fact of the universe. Ants have government. Termites have government.
Wow. At least you're being original :p
> All we can do is decide what structure the government will take.
Actually, as long as we have rulers, we can't even do that. You may be aware of the US quickly turning into a nasty police state. Do you think the people being "governed" had a say in that?
> Do you think we will forever be organized and segregated by governments?
> Do you ever think a human being can be a sovereign individual in his own right, without owing fealty, taxes and morality to a government in some future?
Without governments, how are social strictures enforced? How are externalities, positive or negative, accounted for? How does a government-less world not look like Somalia? (Or are you suggesting that you really would like to live in a place like Somalia?)
This isn't to suggest that existing governments are perfect (far from it), but it seems to me that the anarchic counterpart is infinitely worse.
>"The state does not take money. We no longer live under feudalism, friend. We no longer labor under the unquestionable divine right of kings. The modern democratic state is, by the free association and choice of its underlying organizational units, and the continued consent of its citizens, asked to assume the role and responsibilities, at least in the US, of the following:"
And what if we do not consent? I certainly don't, and yet I have no where to go. You call it freedom of association, I call it compliance under the threat of imprisonment.
Make no mistake about it, you can use fancy words and ideas to make it noble. However, if you choose to gloss over those that do no consent to your wonderful little 'union' of 'domestic tranquility' then you are not at all better than the feudal kings/lords that you use as a counter-example to democracy.
You know what was the big thing about the Feudal system? Absolute ownership of all land by kings/lords, where the peasants had to rent it by virtue of being born on the land. Oh so very analogous to what we have now where people have very little choice but to live in the state that they are born with. There is simply no alternative, no place where free people can go to pursue actual free-association through peaceful means. You just have to replace 'lords/kings' with 'state/government' and you quickly see the picture.
But of course, I am "free". I am free to move to Somalia, apparently. Either that, or more to another King/Lords piece of land.
> The US system is set up assuming that's what all governments do eventually.
What good is it when the fundamental principes arising from those assumptions are constantly being eroded? It appears some american states restrict even the bearing of arms now. If the founders of the USA were to resurrect today, I wonder what they would think about the nation they created.
> Wierdly,monarchs seem to be the default in human societies throughout the ages.
The Roman Republic lasted about as much the Roman Empire. There have been a lot of Republic and Monarchies and I don't know which one more often that the other, but I wouldn't call it a default.
> Even our current system of government is modelled after monarchs. Supreme leader at the top, his second, close circle below, ministers below, bureaucrats below them, and finally us plebs.
This doesn't justify keeping the monarchy, actually it is an argument that we can have something that works similarly without the issues of the inherited rights.
>> And there is little 'new ruler' can do to establish himself if people don't need a ruler.
How charmingly naive!
I don't know that people have needed a ruler at many times in history, but there has always been one. A power vacuum almost always results in war, revolution almost always results in war... basically humans like war and leaders. I don't think that will ever go away. We're tribal animals.
Even if people don't need a ruler, leaders will arise, and some of them will recruit violent men to force their will on others, growing into warlords. Factions will fight each other, people will die.
Better, IMHO, to have a codified power structure that seeks to eliminate or at least mitigate these flaws.
> That’s our responsibility, as citizens who are in charge of our governments.
An important point to make, is that it is not given that citizens are in charge of government.
I might trust my current government to uphold democracy - but that does not mean I trust every future government to do the same and I need laws in place for restricting their rights, not mine.
>>> You effectively consent to being governed by continuing to live within the national boundaries associated with the government associated with that nation.
>>> What's the alternative, and how would you implement it?
Great question. Some here have already mentioned anarchism, which would be great if we could get there- but how could that even happen in the current regime? Most people are not philosophers, and have a hard time imagining things which don't exist here on our little ball of dirt. There is, however, a simple solution which should please anarchists and statists alike: virtual citizenship.
Virtual citizenships are the future. As you said yourself, in the current system one must change geographical location to change states, but why should this be so? We are already seeing the beginnings of this with things like Bulgaria's e-citizenship. Don't like the local religious-influenced government? Switch to another. Governments can work out treaties between themselves to establish a baseline of necessities and cost sharing. Changing your government could be simple and easy, which would force governments to compete for citizens. I think most of us realize the benefits of competition vs monopoly.
It could become the case that competition between governments becomes so fierce that governments start offering large incentives to join them- such as bonuses or minimum income guarantees.
Anyway, that would be my modest proposal for the way forward. This post is the result of thoughtful reflection and is not intended to be trolling in any way. I would appreciate criticisms and responses to my argument. Thank you for reading.
> deprived many less industrialized societies of control over their own citizens at a crucial juncture.
Spoken truly like a person[1] who hasn't had much interaction with states with "control over their own citizens".
Citizens are not meant to be a state's property. That's why we don't call ourselves subjects. Sadly, too many have reverted to feudal thinking these days.
>Notions that the people of any country have the government they deserve is nonsense.
Wrong. If you don't like your government, it's your responsibility to change it. If you disagree, what's your alternative? Pray for alien intervention?
> A novel concept that people may want to attempt to grasp is that there could be no rulers, and as such, there's no need to make up a fictitious "new ruler".
Do you want to run the country? Do you think you have the time to run every aspect of the country? If you don't, then you need to delegate the authority to run those things to others. And then the people who are doing those jobs become the rulers in those areas.
And those areas are going to have to work together, at which point you get hierarchies and people similar to managers and fairly rapidly you end up with what we'd call a government.
If you believe there's a better way to run things, then start a company that works in a more egalitarian manner and scale it. As I understand it though, companies that work even vaguely like that have never scaled well beyond a few hundred people at most - i.e. Dunbar's number.
If you want to solve the problem of people needing a government there are serious questions about complexity and conscientiousness (do people even want to run their own affairs?) and how people are meant to work together when they can't know everything about all the areas they'd have to oversee without empowering others even if they just did that as their full time job.
So, my answer to why do I think people need rulers is, essentially, that equality doesn't seem to scale well to the sorts of problems that a country would have to address at the moment - and, implicitly, that anywhere that decides not to be a country anymore is going to get walked all over by anyone that decides to still be a country.
I was with you up until 'government'. I regard states as exercising unjust authority over people and defenders of private property which is why I'm an anarcho-Communist. The way in which the modern world is divided up means that one must be a subject of some state, which I believe makes there no way to provide proper consent to be governed.
Did you, as an uncoerced free man, ever swear an oath of fealty to the US government? (The pledge of allegiance doesn't count.) Did your parents? Did their parents? Did their parents? Has anyone?
Anybody who may have elected to be governed by the United States is now dead, and the chances are good that you're not even related to them by blood. The vast majority of people who have lived under some form of government in their lives almost certainly did not choose to.
EDIT: Unless they immigrated. Forgot about that option. If you immigrated to the United States, you are exempt from this thought experiment.
But not totally, because you probably weren't stateless when you did.
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